Jewish Americans must take sides on Trump

Last week’s presidential election was a moment of truth for the US Jewish community. On November 8 Jewish voters passed the test when they voted by an overwhelming 71 to 24 percent margin for Clinton over Trump, supporting the former (or opposing the latter) more decisively than any other religious group. But a major exam question is yet to be answered: Will Trump’s aggressively Zionist agenda sway their opinion during his administration?

As with virtually every single issue, what Trump actually stands for is swathed in layers upon layers of contradictions. On the one hand, he has named white nationalist and anti-Semite Stephen Bannon his chief strategist; on the other hand, he is reported to have found an influential advisor in his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The fact of the matter is that contradictions more often than not shed light on the truth of ideology—in this case, the mutual compatibility of Zionism and anti-Semitism. Bannon, after all, is not only an anti-Semite but also vehemently pro-Israel, which makes him a strange bedfellow of someone like Kushner and of Trump himself, who has often expressed his admiration for Benjamin Netanyahu. For the freshly minted ideologue-in-chief, the signifier “Semite” simply slides between the Jews and the Palestinians, that is to say, between classical anti-Semitism and a Zionist stance.

It could well be that certain pro-Israel Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, and leading Zionists, such as Alan Dershowitz, are denouncing the choice of Bannon for a powerful, albeit amorphous, role in the White House for the same reason that the Republican establishment distanced itself from Trump during the campaign: these “extreme” figures mirror and magnify the disavowed reality of their critics on the right. Zionist anti-Semitism reveals the hidden core of Jewish Zionism, just as Trump’s bigotry pulls the curtain on the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the Republican “mainstream”.

In this explosive situation, Jewish Americans will not pass the test of the post-election period if they criticize or even oppose the forming administration out of pragmatic and self-serving concerns. Their political conduct should be rather guided by an intense identification and solidarity with the victims of the newly installed (but also very old) barbarism: Palestinians, undocumented immigrants, racial minorities… Granted, a spate of anti-Semitic incidents all over the country after November 8 renders any such identification, at bottom, egoistic and self-referential. But there remains an important difference between the symbolic violence these incidents represent and the threat of real violence (e.g., deportation or denial of basic rights) to be enshrined in law. The political friend-enemy distinctions have not been delineated as clearly as they are now for decades. At home and abroad, it is up to Jewish Americans to take the side of the oppressed.

About Michael Marder

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His most recent monographs include The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014), Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015), and Dust (2016). He is now completing a book, co-authored with Luce Irigaray and titled Through Vegetal Being.

All of us who are familiar with rural areas and former industrial towns in this country know the impoverishment and hopelessness of many men and women who live there. Barely surviving by holding part-time jobs, since businesses now rarely hire full-time workers in order to avoid paying benefits, they are not just underpaid and constantly in debt, but know in their hearts that they and their children are expendable. Understandably, they are angry. When Democrats proclaimed that the economy was doing well and that we were still the greatest country in the world, they started listening to Trump, who told them what they could already plainly see, that we are in decline. These unfortunates, who’ve been cheated and swindled by bosses, mortgage banks, loan sharks, health insurance companies, and both political parties, have put all their hopes in a billionaire who has a long record of not paying taxes, cheating his workers and contractors out of their pay, and seemingly using his own “charitable” foundation as a slush fund. They voted for a buffoon who doesn’t care whether they live or die.

How is it that only one religion has to take position about what is a general American thing?
How is Jewishness, no matter its definition, relevant?
Ah. So it’s not about Americans who happen to be Jewish.
Can you write the same kind of nonsense about Catholics? That they have to decide a unitary position qua Catholics re Trump?

Calling the “Jewish-Americans” of all classes, oppressors and oppressed all thrown together, to solidarity with the oppressed?
Might justifiably be called clowning.

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